Can Lindsey Graham Be Beat?

When I call Harrison in late May, both of us have found the quietest rooms in our respective homes to chat. He is in his basement, next to his son’s Lego City set. He has plastered Jaime Harrison for U.S. Senate signs on the TV behind him to create a makeshift step-and-repeat. His two kids, a five-year-old and a one-year-old, are upstairs with his wife, Marie, a law professor at the University of South Carolina. They split child-care duties: He takes the kids in the morning; she takes them in the afternoon. It doesn’t always work out perfectly. “Sometimes you get a fundraiser that you need to do, or a discussion with a constituent or a local mayor, and I’m doing it on Zoom with the Pack ’n Play sitting right next to me,” he tells me.

This is not how Harrison imagined trying to become the first South Carolina Democrat to win a statewide election in 14 years. Before the pandemic, Harrison’s team had a meticulous strategy built on changing the electoral math. But despite his early fundraising success and favorable polling, most forecasters still predict that his opponent, Lindsey Graham, one of the most recognizable Republicans in the nation, will win. “When you break down the white vote, the black vote, the Democratic vote, the Republican vote, and the independent vote in its current form, Democrats lose by about 150,000,” Don Fowler, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, told me in January. Democrats have forfeited the South for so long because the numbers do not work.

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The Republican Party’s strength in the South is no accident. In the early 1960s, Republicans thrust themselves to power through the “Southern strategy,” an effort to increase their base of white voters by appealing to racism. The strategy—coupled with Democratic support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—led to a categorical switch of white southern voters from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. As Fowler put it: “The underlying view of a lot of people in many southern states [now], in particular South Carolina, is that the Democratic Party is the party of African Americans, and only unusual white people associate with it.”

Harrison began this year knowing that he needed to register tens of thousands of voters and win over moderate and independent voters, as well as voters who had grown disillusioned with Graham, one of President Donald Trump’s closest allies on Capitol Hill. Stacey Abrams, who has endorsed Harrison, may have been the most successful candidate to employ a similar strategy in a statewide election in the South. She still lost her 2018 gubernatorial race in Georgia—a state Trump won by a smaller margin in 2016 than he did in South Carolina. Historically, South Carolina Democrats have failed to build a robust coalition of voters. Harrison was finally orchestrating a campaign to do just that. He was a Democratic rising star, the potential face of a changing South. And then the coronavirus arrived.

Back in January, Harrison took me to his old neighborhood in Orangeburg. We stopped by the triplex he’d lived in with his mom and grandparents when he was in high school. The eggshell-white paint was chipping from the facade, and I could see bent window screens. At nearby Orangeburg-Wilkinson High, he had been the president of the student council, a member of the academic-quiz-bowl team, and a delegate to the United States Senate Youth Program, which featured a weeklong excursion to the nation’s capital. When Harrison was elected president of his school’s National Honor Society in 1993, he sent a letter to the newly elected congressman from the district, Jim Clyburn, to ask if he would speak at his installation ceremony. If an 11th grader was willing to blindly ask a sitting member of Congress to do something like that, Clyburn told me, “I had to meet him.”